Franz Welser-Möst
conductor
Vita
The Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Möst, who was born in Linz in 1960, has been Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra for more than 20 years, since 2002, and will continue to lead the orchestra until 2027. In addition to the concert series at Severance Hall and the Blossom Music Center, he also performs regularly with his orchestra in Miami and European cultural centers. Welser-Möst previously held leadership positions with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1990 to 1996) and Zurich Opera, with which he was associated from 1995 to 2008; he then served as General Music Director of the Vienna State Opera from 2010 to 2014. Franz Welser-Möst works closely with the Vienna Philharmonic: he conducted the famous New Year’s Concert in 2011, 2013, and 2023. He has also toured the USA, Japan, China, and Australia with the orchestra, most recently appearing with the “Wieners” in New York in March 2024. Additional concerts this season have taken him to the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Welser-Möst is also a welcome guest at the Salzburg Festival. In recent years, he has conducted new productions of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Die Liebe der Danae, Salome, and Elektra; Beethoven’s Fidelio; Reimann’s Lear; and Puccini’s Il trittico. Welser-Möst has received numerous awards for his recordings, including the Gramophone Award, the Diapason d’or, and the Japanese Record Academy Award. Most recently, his account of Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin was released on CD in 2024. Franz Welser-Möst is an honorary member of the Vienna Singverein and a recipient of the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art and the Kennedy Center Gold Medal of the Arts; he was awarded the Festival Pin with Ruby in Salzburg in 2020 and, in 2021, the Austrian Music Theatre Prize for his conducting of Elektra. In 2020, he published From Silence, “a plea for finding calm in a dissonant world” in book form, which has now reached its 7th edition. Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut 26 March 1999 with the Gustav Mahler Youth
Orchestra performing Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.
July 2024
Magazine
